The use of printer drivers that serve as a gateway between an application and a printing device is well established. With a print driver, an application such as a word processor does not need to be aware of the technical details of the printer from which the user desires to print a document. When a user chooses to print a document, a relevant print driver user interface can display on a display device, allowing the user to select options relating to the print job such as, for example, duel-side printing, stapling, punching, sort/stack, paper size, number of copies, output tray, and the like.
A further option offered by some existing printer drivers is N-Up printing, which allows a user to condense a multiple page document into a smaller number of printed pages. To accomplish this, the size of the pages of the document is reduced such that multiple page images are printed on a single sheet. A user can specify a number for “N” to be the number of page images per sheet, which is usually a value between 2 and 16. One benefit of N-Up printing is to reduce the amount of used paper. For example, the amount of paper is reduced 50% with 2-Up printing, and 75% with 4-Up printing. N-Up printing can be particularly useful for producing handouts and presentation notes.
However, a drawback of N-Up printing is that, because of the reduced size of the page images, an N-Up document can be difficult to read. This can be particularly the case if the page images contain small text or image details, or if a high value is specified for N. If an N-Up document is difficult to read, then a viewer of the document may not be able to decipher the document or even know the subject matter to which the document refers. Further, the viewer may not be able to gauge which page of the original document to navigate to based on a glance of the N-Up document.
A need, therefore, exists for systems and methods to add functionality to the N-Up printing feature. Specifically, a need exists for systems and methods to help a user decipher the contents of an N-Up document.